Bachmann: Elect me and I’ll kill the EPA

Rep. Michele Bachmann officially entered the Republican presidential race on Monday night by promising to eliminate a major federal agency established under Republican President Richard Nixon.

Bachmann told the New Hampshire GOP candidates’ debate that she would eradicate the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, calling it “a job killing federal agency.”

The EPA came into being during the Nixon administration — William Ruckelshaus was its first administration — and raised to Cabinet status under the first President Bush. Former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman served as EPA administrator during the second Bush presidency.

Bachmann announced that she has filed papers to enter the race, although she will make a formal announcement in her birthplace of Waterloo, Iowa.

Founder of the Tea Party Caucus in Congress, Bachmann has emerged as a sort of Rachel Carson-in-Reverse, damning environmentalists and making sweeping statements of denial about human-caused warming of the Earth.

“Carbon dioxide is natural, it is not harmful,” she said in a House floor speech of the greenhouse gas that is building in the atmosphere.

“It is part of Earth’s life cycle, and yet we’re being told that we have to reduce this natural substance, reduce the American standard of living, to create an arbitrary reduction in something that is naturally occurring in Earth.”

During Bachman’s first House reelection, in 2008, she declared: “The big thing we are working on now is the global warming hoax. It’s all voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed the EPA’s right to limit emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Curiously, the agency is under fire from conservationists for moving too slowly to exercise its authority.